Digital retouching has allowed us to achieve extraordinary things, and that includes cases that once seemed impossible, such as removing people and objects from a photograph. Unfortunately, the main tools on the market are expensive, gigantic, and have a steep learning curve, but that's not what we find at CleanUp.pictures. The whole process is limited to uploading an image, marking the elements to erase, and letting the artificial intelligence do the heavy lifting.
We won't deny it: sometimes we simply want to erase someone from an image, or make an object that ruins the aesthetics of a good shot disappear. The most popular editing packages have functions that take care of that automatically, but it would be fantastic if this “smart erasing” ever emerged as a standalone app.
Another possibility is to use an online service, and that's when the excellent CleanUp.pictures portal comes in. It's a web app created by the folks at ClipDrop that lets us remove people and objects from a photograph without getting trapped in a maze of tutorials and instructions. The first step is to upload an image, but you can evaluate the service's performance by loading one of its test photos…
How to remove people and objects from a photograph with CleanUp.pictures
Choose the brush size, paint the region or object you want to remove, and the algorithm will take care of the rest. Don't like the initial result? Try an additional pass: mark the affected area, and CleanUp.pictures should be able to clean up any detail. A click on the Original option (with the eye icon) will activate the “before and after” so you can check how deep or subtle the changes were.
The developers of CleanUp.pictures previously explained that their system is based on LaMa, an open-source model created by engineers from Samsung's AI Center, Samsung Research, EPFL in Lausanne, and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. The original publication is relatively recent, and I imagine the current edition of CleanUp.pictures still has some room for optimization.
I say “room” because CleanUp.pictures is not a perfect service, to say the least. Some objects managed to resist the erasing process quite a bit during our tests, even after several attempts. The good news is that we have a zoom system to gain more control over the area to process, so it's not a bad idea to try removing people and objects in portions.
Image downloads in the free edition are unlimited, with a maximum size of 720p per side. If you need high-resolution support without restrictions, you'll need to join the Pro edition of CleanUp.pictures, which requires a monthly payment of two dollars. Removing people and objects from a photograph has never been this easy. Give it a try!
**Official site:** Click here
